‘Ravens’: Red Sea Review

Dir/scr: Mark Gill. Japan/France/Spain/Belgium. 2024. 116 mins

Mark Gill is becoming a specialist in tortured artists. After his take on the early years of Morrissey in England Is Mine (2017), he tackles a bigger canvas with the life of Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase (1934-2012). Ravens offers a melancholic, well-considered portrait of a complex individual who tried to capture and control the world through his camera lens. The presence of Shogun actor Tadanobu Asano as Fukase should enhance the arthouse prospects for an absorbing production.

Makes use of an unconventional narrative device to convey Fukase’s inner turmoil

The question of whether Fukase was a madman or a genius is raised frequently throughout Ravens, and in many respects the film is an attempt to answer it. Fukase is forever at war with the expectations of his father Sukezo (Kanji Furutachi) and the stifling patriarchal traditions of his country. At the same time, he can embrace those attitudes when it suits him – especially when his wife and muse Yoko Wanibe (Kumi Takiuchi) starts to gather the lion’s share of attention. “A woman’s place is not to embarrass her husband,” he drunkenly asserts, signalling the beginning of the end of their rollercoaster marriage.

Ravens is structured around key points in Fukase’s life, starting in Tokyo in 1992 as he prepares to take a photo of himself with a noose around his neck. He recalls his father’s conviction that if you have achieved nothing by the time you are 40, then the only honourable thing to do is kill yourself. The influence of his father is a constant, with the film switching to the family home in the Hokkaido of the early 1950s. Sukezo, played with commanding swagger by Furutachi, has nothing but derision for his son’s desire to attend art college and pursue the life of an artist.

In 1963, Fukase meets aspiring actor Yoko and they are married the following year. She is the inspiration for some of his most iconic photographs, but his desire to support her ambitions is the reason he compromises his artistic integrity to pursue a career in commercial photographer. Fukase is full of contradictions and demons and Ravens is a suitably dark evocation of his world – often set in his gloomy apartment with a drunken, introspective Fukase surrounded by the clutter of a chaotic existence. The apartment is clogged with empty booze bottles and the detritus of abandoned meals, unmade beds and half-completed projects.

Gill makes use of an unconventional narrative device to convey Fukase’s inner turmoil. In his most insecure moments, he is accompanied by a giant raven (voiced by Jose Luis Ferrer). The bird is companion, confessor and portent of doom, urging Fukase towards artistic boldness or pouring scorn on his timidity. Full of aphorisms and advice (“fallen blossom does not return to the branch”, “fame is a gaudy kimono, it fits poorly etc”), the giant talking bard doesn’t entirely work, but evokes Fukase’s fascination with the creature. One of his most renowned photobooks is The Solitude Of Ravens (1986).

The elements that do work include the eclectic score, which contributes a jazzy element to Fukase’s despairing, nighttime drinking sessions, and a soundtrack that includes songs from The Velvet Underground and The Cure’s ’Pictures Of You’. The casting is also spot-on. Tadanobu Asano and Kumi Takiuchi look incredibly like the real-life Masahisa and Yoko and convey the tensions of a couple whose love endured beyond the worst parts of their relationship. 

Gill’s compassionate approach is the key to Ravens, as he attempts to explore Fukase’s demons but also tries to understand the good and bad in those who surrounded him – even the father who shaped so much of his life.